Berners-Lee wins first Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering

The Royal Academy of Engineering has announced that Tim Berners-Lee, the 3COM Founders Professor of Engineering at MIT, has been named one of the winners of the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for his work in creating the World Wide Web. The award honored Berners-Lee, Marc Andreessen, Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn and Louis Pouzin for "outstanding advances in engineering that have changed the world and benefited humanity.”

The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering is a new global engineering prize that will reward and celebrate individuals responsible for groundbreaking innovations in engineering that have been of global benefit to humanity. The prize will be presented by Queen Elizabeth II in summer 2013.

"The prize recognizes what has been a roller-coaster ride of wonderful international collaboration," Berners-Lee says. "Bob and Vint’s work on building the Internet was re-enforced by Louis’ work on datagrams and that enabled me to invent the web. Marc’s determined and perceptive work built on these platforms a product which became widely deployed across nations and computing platforms. I am honored to receive this accolade and humbled to share it with them. I want the web to inspire and empower new generations of engineers — boys and, especially, girls — who will build, in turn, their own platforms, to improve our global society. I hope the message behind this award, along with the work we are doing with the World Wide Web Foundation and W3C, will assist in achieving the vision of a Web that is open, accessible and of value to all."

In 1989, Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, an Internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. He wrote the first web browser and server in 1990. He currently directs the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an open forum of companies and organizations with the mission to realize the full potential of the web. He a professor in MIT's School of Engineering and a principal investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he leads the Decentralized Information Group with Daniel Weitzner, the technology and society domain leader of the W3C.

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